Nick Reding

by Methland: The Death;Life of an American Small Town

  But there’s also a more subtle connection between meth, immigration, and the food industry. That relationship is driven by the conceit that drugs, like viruses, attack weak hosts. Or, to put it another way, narcotics and poverty—along with the loss of hope and place that Clay Hallberg has described—mutually reinforce one another.

  Consider what used to happen in Oelwein, Iowa, before the large-scale consolidation in the 1980s and ’90s of almost every niche of the food-production chain. Corn farmers, such as James and Donna Lein, would have bought seed from the local seed company. Once harvested, that corn would go to a grain elevator, also locally owned. It would be shipped to a small feedlot in order to fatten cattle raised in Nebraska, Wyoming, Florida, or Arizona; or perhaps it would go to a dairy in northern Missouri, a chicken farm in Indiana, or a pork outfit in Kansas. The variables were infinite, and the market was dynamic. The barge, truck, or railroad car that carried the grain was likely independently owned, too, as would have been the pigs, cows, and chickens it fed. At each stage, the price would have to be “discovered” as multiple potential customers vied to handle the product, with competition keeping the price “true,” or fair, in the context of the marketplace.

  Eventually, the Oelwein corn used to feed sows in Topeka might return to Oelwein in the form of hocks to be disassembled, packaged, and shipped at the Iowa Ham plant by people like Roland Jarvis. From there, a whole new market, just as complex and multifaceted, would take over in order to distribute the food and sell it at a retail level, perhaps at the grocery once owned by the Leo family (which today is an IGA). James and Donna Lein would have been the essential building blocks in a vibrant system in which the variables contributed at all stages to what’s called the “social capital” of rural communities. In circulatory terms, there was blood flow even in the capillaries.

  Beginning with the precedent set in 1987 with the IBP takeover of Hormel in Ottumwa—and the subsequent takeover of Iowa Ham by Gillette—a few companies would come to control most of the U.S. food business. Today, according to sociologists like Heffernan, the dynamism essential to the marketplace has been lost because there is no longer a multifaceted context. Price discovery no longer happens; the value chain is controlled by a limited number of entities. Seed is not sold; it’s biogenetically engineered by companies like Monsanto, which entered a joint venture with Cargill in 1998. Cargill—not the farmer—owns the corn that is grown, too, because it’s more than likely that the farmer, who would once have chosen a buyer for his crop, has been contracted to sell only to Cargill. In the Illinois and Ohio river valleys, Cargill owns 50 percent of the grain elevators and other storage facilities. Along with Tyson, Swift and Co., and the National Beef Packing Company, Cargill owns 83.5 percent of the beef packing industry. Cargill, Hormel, ConAgra, and Carolina Turkey own 51 percent of turkey production and packing. Cargill is number one in flour milling; number two in ethanol production and in animal feed plants, producing nine million tons a year; and number three in soybean crushing. If you are a corn farmer almost anywhere from Pennsylvania to Iowa, you are likely to work for Cargill in at least one of several ways. Even in places like Fayette County, Iowa, where Cargill’s presence is implicit rather than explicit, family farms must grow to an enormous size in order to compete. This squeezes out all but the heartiest souls, like the Leins, who care enough about their way of life to essentially take a vow of poverty.

  Douglas Constance characterizes the changes in rural America in terms of Karl Marx’s critique of the theory of political economy posited by Adam Smith. With many buyers and many sellers, says Constance, there is perfect competition and no need for government intervention. Smith’s “invisible hand of capitalism” works, in theory, to effect the highest amount of economic blood flow at all levels. In reality, says Constance, Marx’s countertheory has unfortunately proved more insightful. Strapped with the mandate to “grow or die,” businesses are encouraged to cannibalize competition until there are no longer many buyers and many sellers, but rather, many buyers and an increasingly limited number of sellers. The flow of capital is dammed up. Once competition has been annihilated, Constance says, the surviving companies, like Cargill, begin to effect political decisions through their enormous lobbying capabilities. The government no longer governs unimpeded: it does so in tandem with the major companies, just as Marx predicted. It was less than a century ago that Teddy Roosevelt made his reputation by “busting up the trusts” that had become too powerful. Those “trusts,” not coincidentally, were in large part the industrial meat-packers of the early twentieth century.

  The ability to influence the governmental decision-making process is something the U.S. food and pharmaceutical industries share with the five Mexican DTOs. The two catchphrases repeated by John McCain and Barack Obama in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election were “earmarks” and “pork barrel spending.” Both expressions are, like the “trusts” of Roosevelt’s time, meant to imply the depth and unhealthiness of the relationship between the federal government and major corporations, be they in the food, the oil, or the defense industry.

  One former DEA official who spent eight years in Mexico told me that the DTOs—because of their wealth, their propensity for violence, and the sheer numbers of people they employ both directly and indirectly—have potentially more lobbying power than any legal business in that nation. Fortunately, the comparison between the traffickers’ and the food industry’s ability to sway government ends with the ungovernable violence that accompanies attempts by Mexico City to curtail the drug trade. Unfortunately, the same American immigration policy that provides a low-wage workforce ideal for the food industry is what keeps the DTOs in business. That’s to say that the DTOs do not directly influence the U.S. government. There is no earmarking for the Arellano Felix Organization (AFO) or the Gulf Cartel. But by directly influencing the Mexican government, the AFO and the Gulf Cartel, along with the other three DTOs, do in fact play a role in U.S. politics, for the interests of the DTOs are aligned with those of the likes of Cargill and ADM. So, too, are the interests of the DTOs served by unrestricted free trade, which has been a common priority of both governments at least since NAFTA. A key component of George W. Bush’s first victory, in 2000, was his appeal to Mexican Americans, which he engineered in part by appearing with then-president Vicente Fox of Mexico to appeal for a more open border. In the five trafficking capitals, from Tijuana to Matamoros, there must have been dancing in the streets.

  By 2006, it was clear that the Combat Meth Act would require two things in order for it to work. First, the Mexican government would have to stand up to the DTOs by making it more difficult for them to import bulk pseudoephedrine. Second, the U.S. government would have to stand up to Big Ag and Big Pharma by forcing the former to curtail its employment of illegals and the latter to make cold medicine from something other than pseudoephedrine.

  What’s interesting is that the man who stood at the nexus of the immigration debate raging throughout the U.S. government in 2005 and 2006 is the very congressman who all but single-handedly pushed the Combat Meth Act through: Representative Mark Souder, Republican of Indiana. At the same time Souder was working on the meth legislation, he was an outspoken proponent of President Bush’s plan to solve the “border issue” by heavily reinvesting in technological strategies like eye scans and drone planes. In Souder’s politics, it’s possible to see almost all of the ironies and complexities of the meth epidemic in stark relief.

  Back in October 2005, I went to visit Representative Souder in Washington, D.C. Souder’s district, which includes Fort Wayne, in northeastern Indiana, is home to several poultry plants run by Tyson. The area is much like that around Ottumwa and Oelwein: overwhelmingly agricultural, with one dominant type of employment and many smaller places that have been struggling economically since the mid-1980s. The Third District is also, as Souder put it, “defined by its meth problem.”

  At the time, a year before the passage of the Combat Meth Act, Soude
r was the chairman of the Congressional Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources as well as a member of the Homeland Security Committee. As such, he had three principal obsessions: meth, immigration, and terrorism. The immigration debate had reached a boiling point within the Republican Party, even as President Bush was putting together a policy that would be put forth in his January 2006 State of the Union address. Bush would recommend the use of technology and National Guard troops—along with fence construction—to secure the largely uninhabited and invisible “line” between Mexico and the United States. Souder, like many representatives of both parties, insisted the president was right: technology would stop illegals from entering the country.

  Souder took for granted American’s dependence on immigrant labor—that is, the idea that large companies must be able to pay as little as possible in order to remain relevant in a global economy. Souder also worried deeply about immigration as a contentious divide that threatened to tear the Republican Party in half. That day in his office, Souder described the party’s growing schism this way: some Republicans saw immigrants as a necessary evil, and others were on what Souder called the “We Don’t Want Them Here” side. The former camp included businesses like the meatpacking plants. On the other side, said Souder, were the people who think the illegal Mexicans and other immigrants take jobs from Americans. “Not necessarily racist,” said Souder, “but they don’t want them around.”

  It was difficult to get Souder to give his own take on immigration. At one point, he said, “I’m on the side that says that immigrants in this country have always had the crappiest jobs.” Later, he told a story about his great-aunt Elly, who come to Indiana from Germany, the point of which was that two people can look at one thing and see great differences. When pressed, though, Souder framed the debate first by blaming U.S. workers for their unwillingness to do hard jobs—a contention for which he offered no evidence—and then by highlighting the power of the large corporations that import foreign labor. As he put it, “Maybe Americans will do these jobs. Or maybe they won’t, and we have to have Mexicans and OTMs [other than Mexicans] to do them. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because if we make the companies pay higher wages, they’ll go offshore. It’s as simple as that. And when that happens, we’re not only going to lose the six-dollar jobs; we’ll lose the twelve-dollar and the quarter-million-dollar jobs, too. That’s just reality.”

  When I suggested the often-repeated potential solution of fining companies that employ illegal immigrants while heavily taxing the products of those that move offshore, Souder ignored my suggestion. He instead recited from memory the statistics that had become the pivot points of 2005’s national debate on immigration: three hundred thousand illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border each year; at least one million undocumented people living in the United States (according to the Pew study, the number is twelve million); rampant identity theft; overburdened hospitals going bankrupt by treating people who can’t pay their medical bills. Souder said that he—along with the Republican Party and the support of many Democrats—was advocating heavy new investments in eye scans and computerized fingerprint images to keep track of people who enter the country. He said this would ensure that companies employing guest workers would be better equipped to keep track of their employees. He reiterated the need for infrared sensors and unmanned planes—the very things advocated by Tom Vilsack, then the Democratic governor of Iowa, and Republican senator Jim Talent of Missouri, both of whom I’d also recently interviewed.

  My visit in 2005 to the Nogales, Arizona, border crossing underscored the ridiculousness regarding the idea that illegal aliens desperate enough to risk their lives crossing the desert will stop at checkpoints for eye scans. Given the distance between the checkpoints as well as the harshness of the terrain, one could understand how the term border checkpoint is oxymoronic. The idea that someone in this environment would go out of his way to be checked—or would be stopped by a fence—is beyond reason. Further, my private conversations with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents served to reiterate doubts about the usefulness of drone planes sending immigrants’ geographic coordinates to ICE agents, when in fact the agency is hopelessly understaffed. Really, though, spending time with illegal immigrants in Iowa is all it took to convince me that, as long as there are jobs, there is no reason to think people will not cross the border to get them. In that way, talk of increased border technology seems only to work in tandem with—and as a cynical addendum to—an utter lack of interest in removing the real impetus to walk across the desert: Cargill-Excel in Ottumwa is always hiring.

  Representative Souder, who admits he has never been to Nogales, Arizona, is a strong supporter of DEA and law enforcement. The day we spoke, he said he knew all about the DTOs. He’d been following Steve Suo’s stories in the Oregonian, which implicitly linked the rise of meth to the rise of the Mexican DTOs. Souder had lauded Suo, and had used his reporting as the foundation of his arguments before Congress that something must be done about meth, even veering wide of party lines by very publicly taking to task President Bush’s drug czar, John Walters. Souder was, in that way, as informed and knowledgeable regarding meth as any member of the United States government. If he was unwilling or unable to see the complexities of the issue, I thought, who would be? When our time was up, I asked Souder, as I’d done at the beginning of the interview, if he saw any connection between immigration policy, small-town economies, the meth problem, and Big Agriculture as it existed in a place like Indiana’s Third District.

  Souder paused a long time before he said, “My constituents tell me we have two problems in northern Indiana: meth and immigration. As far as how they’re connected, I don’t know. I just deal with what I’m given. Like I say all the time, I’m just a weather vane.”

  CHAPTER 10

  LAS FLORES

  Shortly after Christmas 2006, Oelwein’s Main Street looked like a movie-set version of its former self. Phase II of Mayor Murphy’s revitalization was complete. The street, which had been ripped up six months before, was neatly and freshly paved. The updated, evenly graded sidewalks were cleanly plowed of snow. Saplings had been planted along both sides of the street, and though they were leafless in winter, they nonetheless promised new life in the spring. Above them, the refurbished streetlamps were hung with wreaths and wrapped in red velvety ribbon. No fewer than nine new businesses lined the sidewalks, all of them in long-empty storefronts, including Las Flores, the Mexican restaurant that had opened that fall.

  Las Flores is equidistant from the movie theater on the north and the Do Drop Inn on the south, and is right across the street from Von Tuck’s Bier Haus. One night I had dinner at Las Flores with Larry Murphy, Nathan Lein, and Clay Hallberg. It had been months since all three men had seen one another; life had gotten busy, and then suddenly the holiday season had descended, replete with its innumerable chores. The 2006 Christmas pageant, which had been the new and improved Oelwein’s de facto coming-out party, had gone swimmingly, by all accounts. Now, life was settling once again into the slower rhythms of what promised to be a long, cold Iowa winter. At six P.M. on the night we met for dinner, the large digital thermometer in the Iowa State Bank parking lot said it was seven degrees, with a wind chill of twenty-four below zero.

  I came into Las Flores with Nathan. We’d been pheasant hunting all afternoon in the cattail breaks and creek bottoms that bisect the land of a farmer known around town as Puffy. Clay and Murphy were already seated in a booth when we got to the restaurant. Keeping the indoor temperature tolerable, if not quite comfortable, seems to be a point of pride in northern Iowa in the winter. As such, it was cold inside the restaurant—not enough to see your breath, but enough so that Murphy and Clay, like the other dozen or so customers, still wore their parkas, albeit unzipped to the middle of their chests to expose heavy wool sweaters beneath.

  Las Flores is the only outward sign, save for occasional sightings in the aisles of the Dollar General or K
mart, of the growing but largely invisible Mexican immigrant population in Oelwein. According to a local RE/MAX broker who specializes in rental properties, there are neighborhoods, particularly in the town’s southwest quadrant, where Nathan lives, in which thirty or forty Mexicans share a few small two-bedroom homes. Most work at the John Deere plant over in Waterloo, though until January 2006 a few dozen had been employed by the now-defunct Tyson meat-packing operation in Oelwein. For well over a century, ever since the Pirillos and the Leos opened their bakeries and restaurants, immigrants in Oelwein have used food as an assimilative lever. Indeed, the mélange of immigrant cuisine and American curiosity is a principal socializing force in our culture, a fact that was once as true in San Francisco’s Chinatown as it is today in small towns throughout the United States, as the number of Mexican immigrants has grown alongside a taste for tacos and fajitas.

  The menu at Las Flores is enormous, as though trying to please both the locals and the Mexican workers. There’s a selection of authentic Mexican food, which includes several fish dishes marinated in lime juice and sautéed in homemade sauces; a selection of Tex-Mex, dishes invariably ending with the word gringo (as in taco gringo); and a selection devoted solely to fajitas. That the fajitas section is at once the largest and the one with the fewest entries, a kind of billboard built into the menu itself, speaks loudly to the fact that, according to Eduardo, he sells a hundred “chicken sizzlers” to every tilapia al ajillo.